Fusion
by Mousme
Summary: Dean and Sam settle down in order to deal with the aftermath of the apocalypse.


Title: **Fusion**  
Summary/Prompt: Prompted by the lovely and talented **roque_clasique** at the Dean-focused h/c meme over at **hoodie_time**. Dean fucks up his knee one too many times and either has to amputate or fuse it, so he chooses to have it fused. He can walk with little-to-no pain, but he underestimated how incredibly frustrating it is to have a permanently unbendable leg - everything is a challenge; sitting, climbing stairs, getting comfortable in bed, and he can't even drive.  
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers up to 5.22. Swearing and angst.  
Wordcount: 2,874  
Neurotic Author's Note #1: The research done on this was, um, hasty. I have no medical knowledge and totally winged this. Please chalk up any errors to artistic license and be forgiving? Many thanks!  
Neurotic Author's Note #2: Dear Roque, your prompt did weird things in my brain and came out all disjointed and angsty and as much about Sam as it is about Dean and his fused knee. I'm sorry? Sort of? Except I'm not, and I hope you like it anyway.  
Neurotic Author's Note #3: Written in the wee hours of the morning today in between calls at work. No beta, no revision, no nothing. It's comment-fic: bad enough I had to research for it! ;)

* * *

It doesn't seem like a huge deal at first. After all, they've already stopped hunting because of Sam's being eight different kinds of fucked up, so in the grand scheme of things, one more reason to stay put isn't going to change anything. It even has a spiffy catch-phrase to go with it: fuse it or lose it. To Dean, the choice is a no-brainer: he'll take the knee fusion over amputation any day. He's too young for a TKR, they tell him, the artificial joint will just wear out before he's forty-five, and it'll suck. So, definitely a no-brainer.

He spends more time than he wants to in the hospital, all kinds of loopy on really awesome painkillers, and then he gets to take slightly-less-awesome painkillers home with him, which makes it not so bad. Then he spends a lot of time on the sofa, especially at first, leg stretched out and propped up with cushions, chain-smoking his way through countless episodes of Days of Our Lives and wondering just how the hell this crap is still on TV. Sam is doing okay enough to handle some stuff on his own, with a little help from Mrs. O'Keefe, the really nice older woman who lives next door. She makes them dinner, doesn't treat Sam as though he's retarded, which makes her a winner in Dean's books.

Sam brings Dean water and painkillers and helps him to the bathroom when he needs to, even occasionally makes bitchfaces when he thinks Dean is smoking too much. Not even the first few times he has to negotiate sitting on the toilet without bending his knee does it occur to Dean that, long-term, this might not be as not-big a deal as he thought. When they figured out this was all going to be pretty permanent, they picked out a place with a large bathroom, and Sam finds a plastic stool on which he can prop up his foot, and it all kind of works out, for the most part.

Stairs are a bit of a bitch, and the first time he tries he ends up sitting halfway up the staircase in a cold sweat, because his leg still fucking hurts sometimes, and now is definitely one of those times, and his cigarettes are still where he left them next to the sofa. For a few days he sacrifices his dignity to expediency and goes up and down the stairs on his ass, bum leg held a few inches above the stairs. He's still too damned giddy about not being in constant, excruciating pain to care much about anything else.

It's when he starts venturing back out in public that he realizes just how much having his leg never bend is going to suck. The very first time he sits down at a booth in a diner and realizes he'll have to let his leg stick out past the bench because there isn't enough room for a guy his height is a bit of an eye-opener. Even moreso is when some guy in a biker jacket trips over his foot and calls him every name in the book before Dean can so much as stammer an apology —which by itself tells him something, since he's never apologized for anything in his life before. He ends up having to haul himself up with both hands, using the table for leverage, before the guy realizes what's up and offers an apology of his own, his face twisted up with pity. Dean is half-tempted to pick a fight right there to prove he's not a useless, pathetic gimp, but Sam is sitting hunched over in his seat, arms wrapped around his stomach as though someone's punched him, so he settles for limping outside and leaning against the wall of the diner and smoking a cigarette.

Trying to relieve himself is probably the worst part of it all. Not all places have handicapped-access washrooms, especially not the places he and Sam tend to frequent. If there isn't enough clearance in front of the toilet then it's fucking impossible to sit down and that just makes him cranky, and when he's cranky he takes it out on Sam and he fucking hates that, because Sam has enough shit to deal with already. So he gets used to the novel and humiliating notion of planning his outings around whether or not he's going to be able to get a potty break, like he's five years old all over again.

Getting around isn't so bad: he wears his brace like a good arthroplasty patient, and it works out, mostly. He kind of has to develop a way of walking that reminds him of Terry Fox, but it works for him and it doesn't hurt at all, and most of the time he doesn't even need his cane, in spite of the worried looks Sam shoots him now and then. Dean has only ever once in his life let himself get beaten down to the point where he was just willing to lie there and let fate kick him in the 'nads, and the less said about his pathetic nervous breakdown before the apocalypse, the better. He's never, ever going to let anyone or anything fuck with his head like that again, let alone his own goddamned body. He is Dean Fucking Winchester, he is captain of his own goddamned ship, and fused knee be damned.

He finds a job as a clerk in a bookstore. The pay isn't great, but it's enough for rent and food, and the manager, Sophie, is pretty understanding about not forcing him to shelve books below waist-level. The irony isn't lost on him that this is the kind of job that Sam would have loved, before he dragged Lucifer kicking and screaming into the Pit. The manager is pretty understanding about Sam, too, doesn't mind him coming and wandering through the stacks every now and then, even lets Dean take the afternoon off when he gets an emergency call on his cell phone.

"Uh, hi, is this Dean?" a woman's voice asks, on that day.

"Yes. Who's this?"

"Hi, I'm Margery, I run the bakery over on Fourth. Your brother's here. He's... he looks like he might be a bit confused?" she turns the statement into a question.

Shit. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

He finds Sam sitting outside the bakery on the sidewalk, hugging his shins, head on his knees. He bends gingerly at the waist, doesn't dare try to sit next to Sam in case he can't leverage himself back up again. "Hey, Sammy. You in there?"

It's been twenty months since the day Sam died, give or take; eight months since Sam's been back, six months since they've been back together. Dean nearly decked Sam when he figured out that he was back among the living and hadn't so much as sent a text message, but when he finally caught up with Sam he found him standing in the middle of a deserted Oregon street, rubbing the back of one hand with the thumb of the other, looking around anxiously, turning on himself.

"I'm not sure which way I'm supposed to go," Sam had said to him, as though he had no idea who he was. "I don't remember."

"Okay," he'd said, putting a hand carefully on Sam's arm, trying not to spook him. "How 'bout you come with me, Sammy, and I'll show you?"

Sam had nodded and followed, docile as a puppy, and had let Dean clean him up and put fresh clothes on him —a little short in the legs and sleeves, but they could fix that later. It took another seven hours before Sam snapped out of whatever bubble he was in and recognized him, and then Dean had to deal with an armful of a sobbing, snotty younger brother who clung to him and babbled apologies and explanations that made no sense, and by then he was so numb he could only sit on the floor and rock Sam and pat his stupid, enormous head until he'd sobbed himself to exhaustion.

Now Sam looks up at the sound of Dean's voice. He's doing better these days, but not all that much. There are times when he'll go for a whole day without so much as a single slip, but more often than not he'll retreat into his own head for hours, and even though he's responsive enough he doesn't make much sense, won't recognize anyone, not even Dean. He wears a MedicAlert bracelet now, and Dean hangs a laminated card on a string around his neck with his name, Dean's name, and Dean's cell phone number. He smiles weakly at Dean, bites his lower lip.

"Hi."

"Hi yourself. What happened?"

A shrug. "I couldn't remember which way to go. I'm sorry. I tried, but it all looks the same."

Sam has tried explaining it to him and to the half-dozen specialists they've consulted, and they've all come up blank. Then again, Dean isn't exactly surprised that there's no diagnosis for the kind of post-traumatic stress that comes from being locked up in the same cage as the devil himself for a hundred years. In the grand scheme of things, he thinks they might have got off lucky that Sam is just a little spacey rather than a gibbering loon, or psychotically violent or something. Sam has a regular drugstore's worth of meds to take, mostly anti-anxiety stuff and a whole lot of pills to keep his neurotransmitters functioning properly, and mostly it works. Dean pats his knee.

"Don't worry about it. You think you can get up, Sammy? We'll go home, but I can't lift you."

Sam nods. "Yeah. Sorry. I didn't mean to wreck your day."

"You didn't. Come on, let me take you home."

That night he orders pizza, makes popcorn in the microwave, and sits on the sofa with the bowl in his lap, watching Die Hard II with his feet in Sam's lap, just to prove he can still be an annoying big brother. Sam doesn't protest, though, just reaches out with a long arm to pluck kernels of popcorn out of the bowl every so often. He glances down at his lap after a moment, then pulls off Dean's socks.

"Hey, watch the merchandise there!"

Sam just shakes his head, then carefully and deliberately digs his thumbs into the ball of Dean's foot, massaging the knots away, and Dean just about drops his bowl of popcorn because it feels so goddamned awesome. Sam keeps working, head ducked down, his hair falling in his face and obscuring his expression, and Dean melts into the sofa, popcorn forgotten, as Sam's hands work their magic. He hasn't felt this good in a really long time, he thinks distantly, eyes closing, and before he knows it he's asleep, head lolling back against the arm of the sofa. When he wakes up again he finds himself in his own bed, and he must have slept like the dead because he doesn't remember getting here or getting undressed, which means Sam must have done it, except that Sam is lying on the bed next to him, on top of the covers, fully-clothed. He reaches out, pets Sam's hair.

"Sammy, wake up. Time to go back to your own bed, Sasquatch."

Sam doesn't stir, and Dean doesn't have the heart to try again. He just settles back, pulls the blanket over Sam too, and goes back to sleep.

After a couple of months have gone by, he realizes that they've fallen into a routine. They get up at the same time every day, seven-thirty am, and he makes breakfast for both of them, lays out Sam's meds in a little plastic cup. Sam walks with him to his job at the bookstore, talks with Sophie on his good days, and on his bad days he smiles a little vacantly at her and doesn't say anything while Dean sets up the cash register and deals with inventory and gets ready for when the doors open at nine. At a quarter to nine Sam leaves, and he stops by the bakery for a coffee and a blueberry danish, and on Tuesdays and Fridays he'll go to the grocery store and buy whatever they're missing, armed with a list prepared by Dean, and then he takes the groceries home.

It's a small town, and after a while the people get used to Sam and his thousand-yard stare. Dean explains it away as PTSD from his time serving overseas, and in this town veterans are well-respected. Even if the locals hadn't fallen for Sam's shy smile and puppy-dog eyes, they would still treat him decently for serving his country. It's not exactly true, but Dean figures that Sam gave up his sanity to save the world, so their admiration isn't exactly misplaced. They all learn to recognize the signs of a bad day, and eventually no one calls Dean anymore when Sam gets lost in his own head. One person or another will take him by an elbow and sit him down somewhere until he snaps out of it, or steer him home if they're close enough, using his own key to let him in.

To his surprise, he finds that the townspeople afford him the same respect and consideration they show Sam, and he realizes eventually that they've concluded that he was in the military along with his brother and just doesn't want to talk about it. It's easier to let them assume, and as a bonus he ends up only paying for every third cup of coffee he buys. Even more surprising is when one Thursday night he finds himself in the same bar he's been in for the last five weeks on Thursday night, beer in hand, leg stretched out to the side and resting on a stool that someone pulled up for him, arguing heatedly about the best way to maximize horsepower with another regular named Duke, and he realizes that he's actually made friends here. He makes his way home close to midnight, a little unsteadier than usual because of the extra beer he drank, and eases himself into the chair on his front porch —the first front porch that's ever been all his own— heel resting on the stool he keeps there at all times. He lights a cigarette, the tip glowing brightly in the darkness, blows a plume of smoke into the night.

The front door opens and Sam slips out, dressed only in his sleep sweats and a t-shirt. He drops to sit next to Dean's chair, leans his head lightly against Dean's thigh on his good side. Automatically Dean's hand drops to the top of Sam's head, petting his hair.

"You good, Sammy?"

"Sure."

He takes a drag off his cigarette, tries to blow a smoke ring and fails. Maybe with practice.

"You ever miss it?" Sam asks.

"What, hunting?"

"Yeah."

He stops to consider it. When he'd been living with Ben and Lisa, he'd missed the hunting life. The whole notion of settling down and living in the suburbs and playing at house, driving Ben to baseball practice and mowing the lawn had felt like a sham. He'd felt Sam's absence like a jagged, gaping hole in his chest, a sucking void that couldn't be filled, and he'd longed to be back on the road every waking minute of every single day. Except now he's not with Lisa and Ben and he's still not hunting, and he hasn't so much as scanned a headline in months looking for a potential case. It wasn't hunting he'd missed, it was Sam. It doesn't take a licensed shrink to tell him that.

"No," he shakes his head. "No, I don't miss it."

"We should have gone to the Grand Canyon when you said," Sam says, apparently irrelevantly, and for a moment Dean's mind reels at the abrupt change of subject, until he remembers a conversation from over four years ago, leaning on a fence outside of Lafayette, Indiana. He barks a laugh.

"We can still go, if you want. You'll have to drive."

It's Sam's turn to shake his head. "You really want me driving your baby all the way to Colorado?" the corners of his mouth turn up in a sly smile.

The Impala is in the garage. Dean is never going to drive her again, but he's not giving her up. Sometimes he finds Sam asleep in her back seat, nose pressed to the leather.

He snorts. "God, no. Not yet, anyway. Give it time." He keeps stroking Sam's hair, smiles as Sam leans into his touch like a cat. They fit together, always have, and now everything else is starting to fit, to fuse into a cohesive whole, and he finds he doesn't hate it. Far from it.

"Yeah, okay," Sam agrees sleepily. "We've got lots of time now, anyway."

"That's right, Sammy. All the time in the world."


End file.
